The need for security is a basic human need. Theft of physical belongings is among the events that cause people to feel insecure. The risk of becoming the victim of theft is not insignificant. According to the Uniform Crime Report: Crime in the United States, 2010 (available on the website for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/property-crime/larcenytheftmain.pdf):                “In 2010, there were an estimated 6,185,867 larceny-thefts nationwide.”        “The average value of property taken during larceny-thefts was $988 per offense.”        “[T]he loss to victims nationally was over $6.1 billion.”Typically, local police are responsible for enforcing laws against theft, but the local law enforcement organizations are frequently incapable of effectively dealing with the volume of these cases.        
Consequently, thefts cost a fortune to humanity worldwide, including the costs for providing trained police forces, court systems, and jail systems, as well as the cost of the goods the police are not able to retrieve and return to the rightful owners.
Today the problem of theft is sometime handled through the use of serial numbers. For instance, the owner of a car may use a serial number or vehicle identification number (VIN) for the car to register with a state department of motor vehicles as the owner of the car. Or the owner of a personal computer (PC) may use a serial number for the PC to register with the manufacturer of the PC as the owner of the PC. However, such a registration process is passive and easy to circumvent or overlook. For instance, it may also be easy for a thief to eliminate an item's serial number. Consequently, serial numbers can be hard to track, and stolen items may be hard to locate, recover, ad return to the rightful owners.
What is needed is a more effective way to connect a person with the item's owned by that person. As described in greater detail below, this disclosure introduces methods and apparatus which use electronic pairing of items to provide greater security for those items.